


Pulling Focus

by etal



Category: Call Me By Your Name (2017) RPF
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-20
Updated: 2018-02-20
Packaged: 2019-03-21 12:12:10
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,252
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13740618
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/etal/pseuds/etal
Summary: 3 loosely connected takes on what we see when we look at CMBYN. (I think?)





	Pulling Focus

A few weeks into the shoot and Timothée is still nervous around Esther. She’s French-cinema royalty, so sophisticated, well-read and scary-smart that even with his own fairly classy CV and Parisian French, Timmy feels gauche around her.

Luca treats her with enormous courtesy and grace, like she's precious, the princess from the folk tale. He doesn’t get _her_ to roll around and smooch in the grass and then randomly wander off. In fact, he very rarely gives her notes on her performance. He’ll speak quietly to her in French, away from the others, so that the motivations they plan for Marzia are frequently opaque to Timothée. After a scene, maybe he’ll say “Encore plus, s’il te plait,” and she’ll do another take and he’ll say “merci, we’re done” and move on.

It’s been a long day, shading into a quiet evening, and it’s just the two of them at a table in the square, drinking Aperols and looking at their phones. Timothée keeps thinking he can hear Armie’s voice but it’s an illusion - he won’t be back until much later. They’re going to meet over in his apartment and Timothée heats a little at the thought of what they’ll do together. He takes a drink and talks to Esther about how she’s feeling about their scene tomorrow, in which Marzia will ask Elio is she is his girl and his lack of care will make her cry.

She shrugs one perfectly tanned shoulder. “Sometimes I’m frustrated with her. What does she do? She hangs about in the dark every night until she gets an unsatisfactory fuck from Elio, who then stops talking to her while he runs after Oliver. And then, oh my god, of course he gives her a book so it’s all ‘read this book and you’ll understand my pain.’ Men I meet are always doing that: giving me books. They never stop wanting to educate me. If it’s not Rilke, it’s Robert Frost, Nabokov… 'read this and you will understand'. Ugh. I have better things to do and I can choose my own books.”

“Hey! The book I gave you - the book Elio gives Marzia - that’s by a woman! Didn’t you read it?” he says, provoking as far as he dares.

She gives him a cool look. “Of course I know Pozzi. But Marzia reads it just because she wants Elio to treat her nicely. The one strong thing Marzia gets to say is when she tells you that she thinks people who read books all the time are hiding. So trying to make someone else read is like burying them, then you don’t really have to deal with them. You put your stupid book between you and them and demand their admiration for being so sensitive and learned.”

Timothée sucks up some of his drink too quickly and makes an embarrassing sound with his straw. Esther looks away, hiding her smile behind her beautiful sweep of hair. He tries to tell her why she’s wrong about Elio.

“When he gives her the book he’s complimenting her, isn’t he? Saying she matters?”

“I don’t know. Sometimes I think she doesn’t get to be a whole person even. She’s just Elio’s rite of passage, part of the landscape. Like the peach.” She gives him a teasing smile but he doesn’t want to stall the argument yet.

“That’s not true. Look, there’s that scene where they shake hands – it’s an agreement of equals. They were friends before they were lovers…”

“Lovers, right. Some lovers, for all of 30 seconds.”

“….and now they go back to being friends, as equals, now that Elio knows himself better.”

They’ve been arguing in French, but Esther switches into English which she doesn’t speak fluently but uses when she wants to stop being subtle.

“The opinions of women matter not _at all_ in this movie. They are the… background which accepts, while men make up their minds. Like… changing the beds or preparing the breakfasts. But it’s OK, Luca is telling the story he is telling, and it’s the story of Elio not of Marzia. It’s him we must look at, I get it.”

Timothée is hurt. It hadn’t occurred to him to think of the film like this. He feels deflated, like there’s a little pinprick in his faith in the absolute rightness of the Crema experience and Luca’s infallibility as a person and a filmmaker.

She stretches, takes a drink and gives him a naughty look over the rim of her glass. “I know. I’m going to write my own sequel. It’s going to be called _Marzia in Winter_ and she’s going to fuck Elio _and_ Oliver, then she’s going to seduce Mr Perlman and make a speech to him about how he should live his life and it’ll finish with her running off with Elio’s mother.”

Later, through the chill of autumn, when the film is finished and the publicity circuit begins, the endless stream of questions about peaches and kissing rehearsals rarely refer to Marzia, or how brave Esther was to let the camera see _her_ body, and witness her character’s humiliation and rejection. Some of the reviews don’t even mention her name. They tend to focus on the fireworks that he and Armie are sending up, and on Michael’s final speech. Amira’s amazing performance goes largely unremarked too. The reviewers don’t bother to write about the stellar level of her smoking work, or how she makes the act of walking across a room a description of what it is to be a woman in command of her household, holding the heartstrings of the place in her hand while the boys ricochet around her in varying degrees of emotional collapse. Timothée puzzles at it. Is it because the film doesn’t want the women to be noticed? He doesn’t think so. It’s just that the camera wants to talk about Elio and every other character except Oliver is jostled to the sidelines of that conversation. But the cold world has shifted since the Crema summer: it’s like everyone is waking up to whose stories get put on screen and how some men behave to the people who make those stories come to life, so now he notices such things more, and questions them.

Timothée watches the whole film for the first time in a while at a screening in London and as ever finds things in it that he hadn’t seen before. He consciously stops looking always at the centre of the screen, at himself, at Armie’s golden glory, and looks to the sidelines, to see what might be hidden there. In the final scene, there’s not much choice about where to look, as Luca intended, while Sufjan’s gentle voice makes sense of Elio’s broken heart. He’s very still as the final scene reaches the moment when Elio looks straight out of the frame, his eyes glazed over with tears, but open, saying... something.

Breaking all rules of cinema etiquette, he pulls out his phone and texts Esther:

_I think when I look in the camera it means solidarity. With Marzia & everyone. E is the focus but his pain is for all? Sorry I didn't get it when we talked x _

Onscreen, Elio drops his gaze and turns to his mother’s summons.

****

Luca is looking at the scripted scene again, the scene where James has written, simply, ‘They fuck.’ They have discussed this so often, he and James, and they cannot agree. James has described what it was like to make a film like _Maurice_ 30 years ago in 1987, a film which novel-Elio might have watched on its release. They amuse themselves imagining Elio and Oliver going to the cinema to see it and finding it tame and so very English.

“Repressed it may have been, but it had _two_ whole dicks in it,” James always says, slapping the table for emphasis. “1987! But I was allowed _two_ full-frontal dicks, plus several sets of buttocks. _And_ there was a scene in an East End boxing club. Ismail, bless his heart, stood by me in every dick-related argument we had with anyone who attempted to thwart our dick-showing intentions.”

And Luca will pour him another glass of red wine and laugh and argue, “I understand James, truly. But there is no taboo here anymore. I could show the two of them fucking in every possible position and it will be no more of a revelation to the audience of today than any television show on their Netflixes.”

He knows he could go further without breaking the agreements which have been painstakingly brokered about the bodies of his actors, but to be involved in wrangling about how many nipples, how many buttocks… how silly. Whatever he might believe regarding the touch of sadism necessary to directors who wish to make the highest possible art by pushing their actors beyond where they think they can go, he despises the industry’s bastards who exploit those over whom they have power. Luca is in charge of his set, but good direction is about moulding, never forcing.

The rhythm of the edit for the ‘They fuck’ scene is already clear in his mind, how the camera will pan away from the lovers on the bed to find the outline of trees against the night sky, timelessness and inhuman longevity contrasting with the precarious happiness of Elio and Oliver. Any fool with a camera can show an audience a dick, he says to James in his mind, but an artist of film must arouse his audience by all means except the obvious.

Luca sees the world not just though cinema but _as_ cinema. For every experience and encounter in real life he can find a correlation in the films he knows and loves, so that every shot he creates is part of a vast and endless conversation with Fellini, and Hitchcock, Tarkovsky, Bergman and Bertolucci, Claire Denis – all of them, his brother and sister auteurs – and the conversations they were all having with musicians and artists and philosophers: Dante and Shakespeare and Woolf and Bowie and Bach and Hockney and all of it! He cannot help himself from occasionally playing the professor with his young actors, but he knows the film itself must not be mere pedagogy. Films should not be reading lists. What he wants, above all, is to remind his audiences how to feel and to teach them how to see. _What_ they feel and see, that is their business. He will show them Oliver and Elio kissing and joining bodies, and then he will drift with them out into the night rather than distracting them with James’ full-frontal fantasises. The camera’s movement will be his question to all those watchers in the dark: “There. Take a breath, I know you’re holding your breath. Can you still hear Elio sighing? Now: what do you see?”

__***_ _

“Look at me sweetheart.” Timothée manages to obey. He’s spent several hours that day with his eyelashes inches from Armie’s but looking at him so close again, like this, with Armie over him, between his legs, with no-one else there watching, makes him ridiculously shy.

Of course they look at each other all the time, the script tells them to. They build a lexicon of different 'looks', which they dissect and refine under Luca’s direction: Elio’s sly glances from under his eyelashes; Oliver’s careless eye-swipes in the early scenes; their mutual searching gazes later on. Armie spends an entire afternoon trying to capture a specific expression, with reference to Miss Debra Winger. Timothée learns how to make minute shifts on Elio’s face depending on whether he’s responding to his mother or his father.

Late at night, between themselves, they light a candle and curate a private collection of looks.

“Watch me,” Timothée will say, and Armie will draw close and keep his hands by his sides while Timothée jacks himself, slow and steady, enjoying the heat of Armie’s eyes on him and the tease of keeping him at a distance.

Armie has promised to fuck him for the first time tonight. They have spent a long time talking about it and taking it nearly to this point. Armie has put his fingers into him and has licked his asshole, gently, insistently, for what seemed like an eternity until he was bucking and groaning against the pillow, and now the time has surely come but Armie is slowing things down again.

“Keep looking at me, I want to see…” and Timothée does what he’s told.

Armie gathers him up, holds his hips as he breeches him and pushes past his first tight resistance until he is entirely buried in Timothée’s body, and Timothée breathes and holds on and just about stays alive.

It’s almost too much, Armie in him like this, the revelation of how much he could lose in the overwhelming pain and passion of this moment. Timothée has to keep something back for himself, until he’s ready to be all in. He wants to hide in Armie’s shoulder but Armie is holding his face as he thrusts implacably, keeping him in the steady focus of his gaze like he’s trying to see as deep into Timothée’s soul as he’s deep into his body.

And Timothée wants to be seen like this even though he can't be sure who he will be when it is over, what new version of himself he is becoming as the object of Armie's fierce regard. His eyes glaze over with tears, but he keeps them open.

**Author's Note:**

> If you haven't seen it, James Ivory directed _Maurice_ in 1987 with his creative/life partner (of 40 years!) Ismail Merchant as his producer. It stars Hugh Grant and Rupert Graves at their most beautiful and floppy-haired; it's a gorgeous, brave film. Also - Edwardian nightclothes, and dicks.


End file.
